Psychology: Social Psychology

Psychology - Social Psychology 

Video playlist on Social Psychology

 

The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 

the world’s largest organization of social and personality psychologists. With over 7,500 members, SPSP strives to advance the science, teaching, and application of social and personality psychology.

Social Psychology

 The subfield in psychology that deals with how our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by our social interactions with others. 

Perceiving Others

Attitudes:

An enduring mental representation of a person, place, or thing that typically evokes an emotional response and related behavior

• The attitudes we hold consist of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components.
• Our social environments shape the attitudes we develop, but research points to possible genetic influences as well.
• Though attitudes predispose us to act in certain ways, they are not very strong predictors of behavior.

cognitive dissonance theory: The belief that people are motivated to resolve discrepancies between their behavior and their attitudes, beliefs, or perceptions. 

A-B Problem: the issue of how we we can predict behavior on the basis of attitude

• factors effecting predicting behavior
  • ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Specificity
  • strength of attitudes
  • vested interest
  • accessibility

 

 

Impressions:

people begin forming impressions upon catching a glimpse of a person, literally in the blink of an eye or a mere fraction of a second

social perception: The processes by which we form impressions, make judgments, and develop attitudes about the people and events that constitute our social world

impression formation: The process of developing an opinion or impression of another person.

social schema: A mental image or representation that we use to understand our social environment.

stereotypes: The tendency to characterize all members of a particular group as having certain characteristics in common.

self-fulfilling prophecy: An expectation that helps bring about the outcome that is expected. 

 

Attributions:

An assumption about the causes of behavior or events

 

dispositional causes: Causes relating to the internal characteristics or traits of individuals.

situational causes: Causes relating to external or environmental events. 

Social psychologist Fritz Heider proposed that people tend to focus more on the behavior of others than on the circumstances in which the behavior occurs

• fundamental attribution error: The tendency to attribute behavior to internal causes without regard to situational influences

actor–observer effect: The tendency to attribute the causes of one’s own behavior to situational factors while attributing the causes of other people’s behavior to internal factors or dispositions.

self-serving bias: The tendency to take credit for our accomplishments and to explain away our failures or disappointments. 

Persuasion

 

Elaboration likelihood model (ELM): A leading model of attitude change, it is a theoretical model that posits two channels by which persuasive appeals lead to attitude change: a central route and a peripheral route.

• When evaluation likelihood is high, attitude change occurs via a central route of processing information, whereby people carefully evaluate the content of the message. When elaboration likelihood is low, attitude change occurs through a peripheral route of cognitive processing, whereby people focus on cues not centrally related to the content of the message.

 Persuasion is influenced by many variables:

• Source variables: are features of the communicator who presents the message. 
• Message variables: Messages that contain emotional appeals are often persuasive. 
• Recipient variables:  No one is immune to persuasive appeals, but some people are easier to persuade than others.

Relating to Others

 

Attraction:

Feelings of liking for others, together with having positive thoughts about them and inclinations to act toward them in positive ways.

 

• Attraction is influenced by
  • similarity: Like birds of a feather, we are generally attracted to people with whom we share similar values and attitudes.
  • physical attractiveness:  Men typically place greater emphasis than women on physical attractiveness of dating partners and mates, whereas women tend to put more emphasis on social status
    • matching hypothesis: The belief that people tend to pair off with others who are similar to themselves in physical attractiveness and other characteristics. 
  • proximity: Nearness or propinquity
  • reciprocity: The principle that people tend to like others who like them back.

 

Love

Psychologists consider love to be both a motive (a need or want that drives us) and an emotion (or feeling state). 

 

Theories of romantic love:

Robert Sternberg’s triangular model of Love:

three basic components:

• Intimacy, the close bond and feeling of attachment between two people, including their desire to share their innermost thoughts and feelings
• Passion, an intense sexual desire for the other person  
• Decision/commitment, the recognition that one loves the other person (decisional component) and is committed to maintaining the relationship through good times and bad (commitment component) 

Sternberg believes that different combinations of these three basic components characterize different types of loving relationships

Social Perception

A subfield of social psychology that studies the ways in which we form and modify impressions of others

 

Primacy effect: the tendency to evaluate others in terms of first impressions

recency effect: the tendency to evaluate others in terms of the most recent impression

attribution: a belief concerning why people behave in a certain way

dispositional attribution: internal, people infer that an event or a person's behavior is due to personal factors such as traits, abilities, or feelings.

situational attribution: external, people infer that a person's behavior is due to situational factors.

fundamental attribution error: The tendency to attribute behavior to internal causes without regard to situational influences

 

Helping Others

 

prosocial behavior: Behavior that benefits others

Psychologist C. Daniel Batson, distinguishes between two types of motives that underlie helping behavior. One type of helping arises from altruistic motives—the pure, unselfish desire to help others without expecting anything in return. But another type is based on self-centered motives, such as the desire to help someone make oneself look good in the eyes of others or to avoid feeling guilty from failing to help.

bystander intervention: Helping a stranger in distress. 

The decision-making model of helping behavior proposed by Bibb Latané and John Darley explains bystander intervention in terms of a decision-making process that can be broken down into a series of five decisions:

• people must decide that a need for help exists.
• they must decide that the situation is a clear emergency.
• they must decide to assume personal responsibility for providing assistance.
• they must decide what kind of help to give.
• they must decide to implement this course of action. 

social norms: Standards that define what is socially acceptable in a given situation.

Influences on helping:

• Situational ambiguity
• Perceived cost
• Similarity
• Empathy
• Facial features 
• Mood and gender
• Attributions of the cause of need
• Social norms

Altruism: unselfish concern for the welfare of others

bystander effect: the tendency to avoid helping other people in emergencies when other people are also present and apparently capable of helping

Attitudes and Behaviors that Harm

prejudice: A preconceived opinion or attitude about an issue, person, or group.

• Prejudice, like other attitudes, consists of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components. 
  •  The cognitive component is the set of biased beliefs and stereotypes that a person holds about other groups
  • The emotional component consists of feelings of dislike that the person has toward members of these groups
  •  the behavioral component is the person’s inclination to discriminate against them

racism: Negative bias held toward members of other racial groups. in-groups Social, religious, ethnic, racial, or national groups with which one identifies.

out-groups: Groups other than those with which one identifies.

out-group negativism: A cognitive bias involving the predisposition to attribute more negative characteristics to members of out-groups than to those of in-groups.

in-group favoritism: A cognitive bias involving the predisposition to attribute more positive characteristics to members of in-groups than to those of out-groups.

out-group homogeneity: A cognitive bias describing the tendency to perceive members of out-groups as more alike than members of in-groups.

discrimination: Unfair or biased treatment of people based on their membership in a particular group or category.

authoritarian personality: A personality type characterized by rigidity, prejudice, and excessive concerns with obedience and respect for authority.

stereotype threat: A sense of threat evoked in people from stereotyped groups when they believe they may be judged or treated stereotypically.

According to Allport, intergroup contact can help reduce prejudice, but only under conditions of social and institutional support, acquaintance potential, equal status, and intergroup cooperation.

contact hypothesis: Allport’s belief that under certain conditions, increased intergroup contact helps reduce prejudice and intergroup tension.
 

Human aggression:

• The biological underpinnings of aggression reflect genetic, hormonal, and neurotransmitter influences.
• Social-cognitive theorists view aggression as learned behavior that is acquired through observational learning and reinforcement.
• Sociocultural theorists explore the social stressors that contribute to aggressive behavior, including poverty, child abuse and neglect, family breakdown, and exposure to violence.
• Alcohol is linked to aggressive behavior through its effects on loosening inhibitions, impairing the ability to weigh the consequences of behavior and interpret social cues, and reducing sensitivity to punishment-related cues.
• Frustration and anger are negative emotions that may serve as triggers for aggression.
• High temperatures are linked to aggressive behavior, perhaps because they induce angry, hostile thoughts and feelings that become expressed in aggressive behavior 

Group Influences on Individual Behavior

personal identity: The part of our psychological identity that involves our sense of ourselves as unique individuals.

social identity: The part of our psychological identity that involves our sense of ourselves as members of particular groups. Also called group identity.
conformity: The tendency to adjust  one’s behavior to actual or perceived  social pressures.

• psychologist Solomon Asch lead us to recognize that we may conform more than we think. Asch set out to study independence, not conformity. He believed that if participants in the study were faced with a unanimous group judgment that was obviously false, they would stick to their guns, resist pressures to conform, and report the correct information. He was wrong. 

compliance: The process of acceding to the requests or demands of others.

Marketing: 

lowball technique: A compliance technique based on obtaining a person’s initial agreement to purchase an item at a lower price before revealing hidden costs that raise the ultimate price.

bait-and-switch technique: A compliance technique based on “baiting” a person  by making an unrealistically attractive  offer and then replacing it with a less attractive offer.

foot-in-the-door technique: A compliance technique based on securing compliance with a smaller request as a prelude to making a larger request.

door-in-the-face technique: A compliance technique in which refusal of a large, unreasonable request is followed by a smaller, more reasonable request.

 

obedience:

Compliance with commands or orders issued by others, usually people in a position of authority.

Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram developed a unique and controversial research program to find out whether ordinary Americans would perform clearly immoral actions if they were instructed to do so

• In the classic Milgram studies of obedience, ordinary people were willing to obey the dictates of an external authority even to the extent of inflicting what they believed were serious and even dangerous shocks to other supposed participants.

legitimization of authority: The tendency to grant legitimacy to the orders or commands of people in authority.

social validation: The tendency to use other people’s behavior as a standard for judging the appropriateness of one’s own behavior.

social facilitation: The tendency to work better or harder in the presence of others than when alone.

Evaluation apprehension: concerns that others are evaluating our behavior

social loafing: The tendency to expend less effort when working as a member of a group than when working alone.

Social decision schemes: rules for predicting the final outcome of group decision making on the basis of the member's initial positions

groupthink:

Irving Janis’s term for the tendency of members of a decision-making group to be more focused on reaching a consensus than on critically examining the issues at hand.

deindividuation: the process by which group members may discontinue self-evaluation and adopt group norms and attitudes

Polarization effect: the taking of an extreme position